Are you worried about those “senior moments” when you try to think of someone’s name or the title of a book you just read but can’t retrieve the information? Well, you can stop worrying about those “brain farts,” according to Brian Christian, co-author of Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions.
I heard Christian interviewed on my favorite podcast Note to Self with Manoush Zomorodi when he talked about “6 Algorithims That Can Improve Your Life” — abstract ideas to solve real and sometimes annoying problems.
Christian is all about the intersection of technology and humanity and figuring out how to use data to help people optimize their lives. He’s obsessed with using numbers to understand people and help them make smarter choices.
He says you should not beat yourself up over those “senior moments” when you lose your train of thought or can’t come up with someone’s name. If you think of the brain as a storage mechanism, the amount of information you accumulate as you go through life is astronomical. So the challenge as you get older is not how to have a mind that can flawlessly recall every single thing. Computer science teaches us that there’s a fundamental trade-off between size and speed. If you make a memory that’s larger, it’s necessarily intrinsically slower — and the larger it gets, the slower it gets. So if you’re older, you have more data and it’s harder to retrieve that information.
What we think of as failures in performance are really intrinsic difficulties with storing more information. For example, if you were to look up a book at the Library of Congress, it would take you longer to find that title than if you were to look at your local branch. So the pessimistic outlook is that we’re all on this track toward slower and slower performance but we shouldn’t think of it as faulty wiring. It’s an intrinsic trade-off that we make when we learn more.
Christian says we should just think of a “brain fart” as a “cache miss” or a fundamental trade-off between size and speed. The more we know, the more likely we are to have a brain fart. So don’t feel bad — your brain is storing so much information it just needs more time to access it, smarty pants!
Of course, there is the other side of the coin: while many of these small slips are certainly normal, new research suggests that all memory loss should be taken seriously. A study published in the journal Neurology reported that researchers found patients in a ten-year study who experienced memory problems at some point during the study were three times more likely to develop serious cognitive problems later on in life.
“Many people worry about their memory as they get older, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have or will soon develop disabling memory and thinking problems,” says Dr. Eric Reiman, executive director of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute. “It is important to note that many individuals with subjective memory concern did not progress to the clinical stages of Alzheimer’s disease during their lifetime, an important consideration for persons who worry about their memory at older ages.”
Reiman says it’s important to recognize the differences between absentmindedness and serious memory loss. Forgetting minute details of an event or facts over time, recalling details with a personal bias, or struggling to remember a word or name that’s at the tip of your tongue are all normal slip-ups. However, the inability to recognize a familiar person or place can be cause for concern.
So the next time you have a senior moment, don’t beat yourself up. Instead, pat yourself on the back for having a brain chock full of information!
